


l'hadlik neir shel Shabbat

by grainjew



Series: stared at the sun and the sun smiled back and called itself pirate king (or: loyalty, on the high seas) [11]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Introspective Nonsense, Loyalty, copious misuse of fire metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-02 22:46:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16796176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: Except for that he had already begun pounding at all her carefully maintained retaining walls when he looked at her upon her request to join his crew, staring at her with an intensity that she could imagine setting her aflame and leaving only the heart of her behind to mark the ship's deck with char.Robin, and all the times Luffy refused to let her die.





	l'hadlik neir shel Shabbat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallingwish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/gifts).



> ive had this lying around unfinished since like april....some classic zephaniah grainjew introspective nonsense, I just actually managed to bring this one over 1000 words so I could post it on its own. like all my introspection ficlets the working title was a clown act but I decided to keep going with the judaism theme instead haha

When Robin joined the Straw Hats, she called the D boy "Captain" because in her experience the fastest way to earn trust was a show of respect. The fact that the rest of the crew did not seem to call him captain, or show any respect, threw her off her stride a little, but she had perfected this game over twenty years of cheating death for just a little bit longer, and she would not be deterred.

Except for that he had already begun pounding at all her carefully maintained retaining walls when he looked at her upon her request to join his crew, staring at her with an intensity that she could imagine setting her aflame and leaving only the heart of her behind to mark the ship's deck with char.

And then: "Don't worry. She isn't a bad person." All the trust and certainty in the world in a level gaze and light tone, a smile blinding like he had never lost a thing, or he had lost and laughed through it. Saul's wisdom. What was it that made a D?

But she compartmentalized, placed her speculation carefully to one side and that sense of being _seen_ firmly under a pile of old thoughts, and tried not to think about the uneasy ease with which the Straw Hats — even the dubious swordsman, whose threats never amounted to more than rarer and rarer glowers and who seemed content to trust the captain's decisions — drew her into their dynamics, the way she could wear the name her mother gave her free of the disgust and horror that so often accompanied its utterance.

In the process of freeing a sky island (a sky island!) from the grasp of a tyrant-god, she came across a Poneglyph that she would never have otherwise had the chance to encounter, and emblazoned upon it a clue to the Rio Poneglyph, signed by the Pirate King himself. By Gol _D_ Roger, the centerpiece of his name unexpectedly set apart and made significant.

Jaguar D Saul, who died to save her and counselled her to smile. Monkey D Luffy, who forcibly dragged her up out of that tomb and her despair and then dragged her further up to even the sky. Gol D Roger, called Gold, who sparked an era with his dying words and knew the language of the Poneglyphs. What connection ran between them? If she was just able to stay with the Straw Hats, then perhaps…

They screamed as they plummeted from the clouds, and then laughed and laughed when they all didn't die, and Robin _ached_ with the desperate desire to stay with this little family forever, to heed her captain’s call and give unto him her trust and her life.

But she couldn't, she couldn’t. The world was colder than that.

And then she saw Aokiji, and everything was ice.

They unfroze her, and her captain beside her, with a gentle sort of care that felt almost foreign. She learned that they had all tried to fight for her, that the captain had almost died for her, and she felt a doubled chill, fear of what they would do for her and fear of what they wouldn't. This was too perfect to last; Aokiji's appearance and obliteration of even their strongest fighters in an instant a much-needed reminder that the world was too cold and too cruel for any sort of love. Eventually, they would grow tired of her burden and leave her behind on the path to their dreams, or she would betray them all to survive alone. Neither option was something she could bear, not anymore, not now that she had burned in the D boy's smile and been reborn anew to someone so terribly warmer.

Water 7, the City of Shipwrights. It was a marvel, its history twisted and veined and changing to the turn of the waves. She took the chill of its water and the secrets of its masquerade and sculpted wall after careful wall in her mind, around that core of warm embers she hadn't ever asked for but found herself unbearably reluctant to put out. She shivered.

And when a stranger tapped her shoulder and whispered _CP-9_ , she knew what she had to do.

They framed her crew for murder with impersonal malice and shackled her in heavy seastone, and she built a sort of bleak hope into the bricks of her enclosement. They would be safe, and she would die, and that would be the end of that. They would forget her eventually for brighter horizons less haunted by death, and that would be right, and good, and the best possible ending. They would be safe. She would die. They would forget her. That would be that.

She should have known better than to hope.

That boy with fire in his eyes, that captain crowned with ambition who faced impossible odds and won, who refused to let her die without even knowing her and handed her a tangled stack of unearned affection and unanswered mysteries as compensation. That boy with the letter D in his name, he followed her and the rest of the crew with him, and looking at them arrayed so proud across an endless gap sent Robin's heart to her throat like she was falling from the sky all over again.

Words were exchanged. Robin shaped her despair into sentences and shot it blindly across the chasm with all the force of a twenty-year's resignation, cornered and suddenly uncertain. But it didn't impact, or it did and it didn't matter, not against the way her captain stared at her like a memory of their first meeting, issued a single order in a low tone like thunder and set afire the world and her walls and the way of things. Not against the way the burning heart of him sparked across the chasm with his voice and caught in all her pretensions like they were chaff and paper-maché to set them aflame.

Not against the way she suddenly remembered, blazing, how to desire.

To belong wholly to someone, to be possessed of their love and their trust and their protection... well.

Robin had been nobody's for twenty years, or dead Ohara's, and before that she was not quite her mother's and not at all her aunt's, only sideways the scholars' and only for three days Saul's.

And so, in a sort of deep, grateful sigh, an acquiescence to being _known_ and an excavated faith in their dreams, Devil Child Nico Robin, archaeologist, survivor, assassin, historian, spy, gave herself over to Straw Hat Monkey D Luffy, future King of the Pirates, and Robin gave herself over, all the charcoal and the embers and the leaping flames of her, to Luffy.

**Author's Note:**

> Im on tumblr @grainjew but more importantly I made a One Piece discord server on a whim the other day! Its chill and full of friends. Heres the invite link: https://discord.gg/jYnD2CS
> 
> Please come talk to me on either platform you will make my day!


End file.
